DJ NikNak and Khadijah Ibrahiim on their podcast Dead ’n’ Wake

Nicole Raymond, aka DJ NikNak, and Khadijah Ibrahiim created Dead ’n’ Wake: Reset and Come Again for the opera company’s Resonance programme, for Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic professional musicians and composers working in the North of England.

With the help of the Pressure Sounds catalogue the pair uncovered the roots of reggae, dub and sound system music in ritual and folk traditions.

“I’d been wanting to work with Khadijah for a while, we’d had conversations and ideas but we weren’t sure how to implement them, then the universe did its thing,” says Raymond, explaining how they both became aware of the opportunity offered by the Resonance initiative.

“We got selected, which was awesome, and because it was during the first lockdown it was a lot of Zoom calls and emails with Khadijah and Opera North, working out how we could get the materials together to produce the work.”

Recordings from Ibrahiim’s archive were transformed by Raymond through collage, scratching and the application of reverb, delay and other audio effects.

The writer, who has an MA from the University of Leeds and is the artistic director of Leeds Young Authors and producer of Leeds Youth Poetry Slam festival, says her interest in “heritage and lineage and the preservation of what that means in a British landscape” began in the early 2000s following travels in Yemen for university research. “When I got back to England it sparked this interest in terms of how would I address my own heritage through migration. It also stemmed back to conversations with my grandparents. You think you’ve had all the conversations you want with family members then you realise there are so many more questions you want to ask.

“I lost my grandmother in 1999 and I travelled to Jamaica in 2000 and that opened up this rich melting pot of culture. The first collection of poems was Rootz Runnin (in 2008) and then Another Crossing came. In 2019 I received a grant from the Arts Council to be able to embark on what Another Crossing was... That research enabled me to look at that Jamaican landscape through the sounds and what I was feeling, but also how does that measure up to the African-Caribbean sounds in Britain. As generations change those sounds are also changing.”

Ibrahiim is full of praise of the Resonance initiative. “What’s so challenging but also exciting is that it really breaks down all those stereotypes of what Opera North is, what they present, and programmes like this that begin to open up that narrative of diversity. We’re about pushing the boundaries and experimenting and really testing those waters.”

Listen to Dead ’n’ Wake at https://soundcloud.com/opera-north/dead-n-wake-reset-and-come